There has been a rapid increase in the television viewership in the recent times. This is due to the fact of increased broadcasting channels that are constantly broadcasting various programmes related to entertainment, sports, current affairs, education, marketing and other information dissemination.
Television broadcast is being made in multiple ways including terrestrial, cable TV, satellite TV and Internet TV. In case of terrestrial television, the broadcasting station broadcasts signals comprising audio-visual contents which are captured by the terrestrial antennas installed at the receiver terminal, which tunes with the frequencies in order to view the said audio-visual contents.
Due to limited number of channels using terrestrial mode, the television broadcast further was extended to cable TV broadcasting, wherein the users' terminal is able to receive different programmes broadcasted by multiple channels tuned at different frequencies. Typically, co-axial cable is used for receiving multiple channels.
As the technology improved further, satellite TV broadcasting was introduced. In the satellite television, all the broadcasting channels transmit different programmes via satellite which are received by the dish antenna installed at the consumer's home who by using the Set-top Box (STB) receiver is able to play the programmes of the multiple channels broadcasting these programmes.
The world today has been apparently moving further from analog to digital television. That is these programmes are being broadcasted in a digital domain, transferred to the receiver and decoded to be watched on the television which can be digital or analog.
Thus, there has been a tremendous growth in the television broadcast and it is expected to grow at the constant rate in the coming years. It is now considered as the most reliable, efficient and cheapest mode for dissemination of information.
Further, due to the increased viewership and popularity of multiple programmes, these channels have extended the television viewership by introducing various interactive programmes such as distance learning, advertising, video using multiple cameras in a sports telecast, online gaming and online shopping etc. This has helped the television channel broadcasters to increase their revenues. Such a concept is generally termed as “Interactive TV”. As a result the number of broadcasted channels facilitating broadcast of interactive TV content is on the rise.
However, there is a limited bandwidth available for transmitting the multiple channels. As a consequence of this limited bandwidth it is only possible to transmit limited data carried by such channels.
For example, in a country like India, it is a huge challenge to support distant learning in multiple states, each having their own curriculum and language, in a limited broadcast channels.
Let's consider the case for India having 26 recognized boards for school education in different states each having their own syllabus, if we assume that under each board, there are 6 classrooms displaying tutorial videos using 2 languages per tutorial video, it will need at least 26*6*2=312 broadcast channels. This is an infeasible proposition considering the economic structure and scarcity of available satellite bandwidth and other resources required.
Thus there is a need to design a system that reuses the standard broadcast infrastructure and standard receivers to support the requirement of sending these 312 tutorials using only a few broadcast channels. That is, there is a need of a technical solution that is capable of sending multiples channel of data through one channel using the existing broadcast infrastructure.
Several attempts have been made in the past that enable transmission of the multiple channels of data through a single channel. However, the systems and methods known in the art are limited to multiplexing and transmitting multiple channels carrying multimedia information in digital domain. Around 95 percent households today in developing countries like India still support analog television. Though, the concept of “Digital TV” has grown in leaps and bounds, it is still far from the rural areas that accounts around 75 percent population of India.
As will be appreciated, there is a clear a need to design a system feasible of sending multiple channels of data through one channel using existing analog broadcast infrastructure. That is, to design a system that is capable to reuse the standard broadcast infrastructure and standard receivers thereby enabling multiple channels of data to be transmitted in an analog domain and then receiving and extracting each of such transmitted channels separately.
More specifically, there is a long felt need to utilize the available bandwidth in a smarter way for transmitting multiple channels of analog data through a single analog broadcasting channel. For example, considering a distance learning environment or multiple videos captured by camera for telecasting sports content, there exists a need for broadcasting these multiple videos in analog domain by multiplexing the multiple channels carrying these videos through few broadcasting channels. As a result of such multiplexing and transmission of multiple videos in analog domain, it is possible to alleviate the limitations of prior arts in serving the broadcast of multiple channels of data in a digital broadcasting domain only.